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THE DOCTOR'S DAUGHTER.
BY "VERA."
AUTHOR OF "HONOR EDGEWORTH"
"_O Tempora! O Mores!_"
PREFACE.
Charles Dickens observes with much truth, that "though seldom read,
prefaces are continually written." It may be asked and even wondered,
why? I cannot say that I know the exact reason, but it seems to me
that they may carry the same weight, in the literary world, that
certain _sotto voce_ explanations, which oftentimes accompany the
introduction of one person to another, do in the social world.
If it is permitted, in bringing some quaint, old-fashioned little
body, before a gathering of your more fastidious friends, at once to
reconcile them to his or her strange, ungainly mien, and to justify
yourself for acknowledging an intimacy with so eccentric a creature,
by following up the prosy and unsuggestive: "Mr. B----, ladies and
gentlemen," or "Miss M----, ladies and gentlemen," with such a
refreshing paraphrase as, "brother-in-law of the celebrated Lord
Marmaduke Pulsifer," or, "confidential companion, to the wife of the
late distinguished Christopher Quill the American Poet"--why should
not a like privilege be extended the labour-worn author, when he
ushers the crude and unattractive offspring of his own undaunted
energy into the arena of literary life?
Mr. B----, without the whispered guarantee of his relative importance,
would never be noticed unless to be riled or ridiculed; and so with
many a meek and modest volume, whose key-note has never been sounded,
or if sounded has never been heard.
We would all be perfect in our attributes if we could! Who would write
vapid, savourless pages, if it were in his power to set them aglow
with rare erudition, and dazzling conceptions of ethical and other
abstract subjects? If I had been born a Dickens, _lector benevole_, I
would have willingly, eagerly, proudly, favoured you with a "Tale of
Two Cities" or a "David Copperfield;" of that you may be morally
certain, however, it is no mock self-disparagement (!) that moves me
to humbly acknowledge (!) my inferiority to this immortal mind. I have
availed myself of the only alternative left, when I recognized the
impossibility of rivalling this protagonist among the _dramatis
personae_ of the great Drama of English Fiction, and have done
something of which he speaks very tenderly and delicately somewhere in
his prolific writings, one's "best." He says, "one man's best is as
good as another man's," not in its results, (I know by experience),
but in the abstract relationship which exists between the nature of
the two efforts, and I am grateful to him for having thus provided
against the possible discouragement of "small authorship."
In the subjoining pages, I offer to the world, a pretenseless record
of the impressions, opinions, and convictions which have been, I may
say, thrust upon me by a contact, which is yet necessarily limited,
with the phases of every-day life.
That some of these reflections and conclusions should not meet with
universal sympathy or approval, is not at all to be wondered at, when
we consider how much more different, than alike, are any two human
lives and lots. I do not ask my readers to subscribe to those tenets
and opinions which may seem unreal and exaggerated to them, because of
their different experience; I can only justify them in myself, by
declaring them to be the outgrowth of my own personal speculations in
the market of commonplace existence.
It has been my pleasure to probe under the surface of sorrow and song
that makes the swelling, restless tide of human passions a strange and
tempting mystery, even to itself; and though my pen may have failed to
carry out the deep-rooted ambition of my soul, there is some comfort
in the thought that I have made an effort; I have tried my young
wings, with the hope of soaring upward: if they are yet too feeble to
bear me, I am no more than the young eagle, and must rise again from
my fall, to await a gathering confidence and strength that may, or may
not, be in store for me.
A little mouse presumed to be the deliverer of a mighty lion, when
this noble beast lay ensnared and entangled in a net; it was slow and
tiresome work for the tiny benefactor to nibble now here, now there,
wherever its small teeth could find a vulnerable or yielding spot: but
a determination and decision of purpose, coupled with an undaunted and
fearless perseverance, have given issue time and again to achievements
even greater, though still less promising, than the undertaking of the
little mouse in the fable, but for those who can yet take heart, in
the face of possible failure, I think half the battle is won.
In introducing a second effort to the public, I feel called upon to
avail myself of the opportunity it affords me, of thanking many
readers for the kindness and consideration extended to my first. It
was kind of them to have dwelt at length upon its few redeeming
traits, and to have touched lightly and gently upon the cruder and
more faulty ones; it was kind of them to have taken into account every
circumstance which had any bearing upon the nature of the work: to
have alluded to the youth and inexperience of the writer. It was kind,
even of those who took it upon themselves to aver, not in the hearing
of the authoress herself, but elsewhere, that the composition was far
from being original. This latter verdict would have been the highest
tribute of all to the talent and erudition of the authoress, had they
who uttered it been capable or responsible judges of literary merit.
Being of that class, instead, who feel it urgent upon them to say
something, however garrulous or silly, when a local topic agitates
their immediate sphere, the authoress has not much reason for hoping
that their intention was really to flatter her maiden effort, by
purposely mistaking it for the work of an older, and abler hero of the
quill; however, if it might have been worthy of a maturer mind and
more powerful pen, in their eyes, a high compliment is necessarily
insinuated, even there, for the humble writer.
If the present story can lighten the burden of an idle hour of
sickness or sorrow; if it may shorten the time of waiting, or distract
the monotony of travel; if it may strike a key-note of common sympathy
between its author and its reader, where the shallow side of nature is
regretfully touched upon; if it may attract the potent attention of
even one of those whose words and actions regulate the tone and tenor
of our social life, to the urgency of encouraging, promoting and
favouring the principles of an active Christian morality, whose beauty
lies, not in the depths or vastness of its abstract conceptions, but
in its earnest, humble, and tireless labours for the advancement of
men's spiritual and temporal welfare--if it may do any one of these
things, it shall have more than realized the fond and fervent wish of
the author's heart: it shall have reaped her a golden harvest for the
tiresome task she has just accomplished, and shall have stimulated
anew her every energy, to associate itself more strongly and ardently
than ever, with the cause which struggles for men's freedom from the
fetters of a sordid and tyrant worldliness.
CHAPTER I.
Five-and-thirty years ago, before many of my fair young readers were
inflicted with the burdens of life, there came into this great world,
under the most ordinary and unpretending circumstances, a helpless
little baby girl: a dear, chubby, little thing, who at that moment, if
never afterwards in the long and intricate course of her mortal
career, looked every jot as interesting and as promising of a possible
extraordinary destiny as did the little being who, some years before
that, opened her eyes for the first time upon the elegant surroundings
of a chamber in Kensington Palace; and neither the Princess Louise of
Sachsen-Koburg, nor Edward the Duke of Kent, were any more elated or
gratified over the grand event which came into their lives on the
twenty-fourth of May, in the year of Our Lord 1819, than Amey and
Alfred Hampden were on the eighth of December, 185-, at the advent of
this little stranger into their humble home. Buried in baby finery,
this unsuspecting new-comer slumbered contentedly in a dainty cot. The
room was silent and darkened, the bright morning sunshine being shut
out by the heavy curtains which were carefully drawn across the
window: there was a ring of rare contentment in the crackle and purr
of the wood-stove, that filled a remote corner of the room with its
comfortable presence: and the sustaining spirit of wedded love, was as
pronouncedly omnipresent as befitted the interesting occasion.
Thus, so far as the eye of those who prognosticate from existing
circumstances could see, there was every prospect of comfort and
happiness in the dawning future, for this passive little bundle of
humanity lying in state in her neatly furnished basket-cradle; whether
it pleased his reverence Father Time, or not, to subscribe thus
obligingly to the wishes of a concerned few, is a secret which my pen
can best tell.
So strangely do the destinies of men and women resolve themselves out
of every day circumstances, that philosophers and moralists, with
their choicest erudition, are ofttimes puzzled over the solution of a
mysteriously chequered life, which they will not allow was guided by
the most natural and common-place accidents of existence.
That there are certain premises, from which the tenor of a yet unlived
life can be more or less accurately anticipated, no one will deny.
There are certain surroundings, certain particular circumstances,
that, from time immemorial have never failed to produce certain
infallible results; but, these abnormal pauses, and unforeseen
interruptions, that, time and again, have made of human lives the very
thing against which appearances were guarding them, are, it may be
providentially, held outside of the range of man's moral vision, and
screen themselves in ambush along either side of the seemingly smooth
vista, that spans the interval for certain individual human lives,
between time and eternity.
Such a high-sounding title as predestination, seems to lose much of
its potent charm when we take an interesting existence into our hands,
to dissect it, and analyse it, and reduce it to a rational origin.
Like decades of heterogeneous pearls, a human career with all its
varied details, glides through the fingers of the moral anatomist,
each fraction standing out by itself, suggesting its own real or
relative importance, yet associating itself ever with the rest, making
of the whole a more or less intricate, and, at best, a very uneven
chain.
When we consider that all the bewildering throng around and about us
have evolved into their present conditions of misery or joy from a
passive and innocent babyhood, we are mystified and awe-stricken;
there is so much inequality among the lots and portions of the
children of men, that it comes strangely home to us in our reverie, to
realize that the starting-point is, for one and all, the great and the
lowly, one and the same.
In its cradle, or on its mother's breast, the human creature knows no
special individuality, but when the rails of the cradle have been
climbed over, and the first foot-print stamped unaided upon the "sands
of time," a distinct personality has been established, which is the
embodiment of possible, probable, or uncertain influences--a
personality which grows and thrives upon internal stimulants
administered by an expanding mind and heart, and which leans almost
entirely for support upon the external accidents of fate or fortune
that may come in its way.
Were we as thoroughly penetrated with this conviction as we should be,
how different would be the issues of many human careers? Could we
accustom ourselves to meditate upon this truth as seriously as we
would upon a religious one, to examine our conscience from it as from
a reliable standpoint every day of our lives, what a flood of sympathy
and Christian charity would be let loose upon the social world from
converted hearts?
When men and women will thoroughly understand the strange and intimate
frame-work of human society, the wail of the pessimist will be soothed
and hushed forever: for then will they realize how dependent we poor
mortals are upon each other for sorrows or joys: then will it be plain
to them that no human life, however obscure, however trifling, is an
unfeeling thing, apart from every other, outside the daily contact of
every other.
Ah! we think, that God's creation, in all its grandeur and unrivalled
beauty, would be little worth, to a creature born to live and enjoy it
alone: and the infinite Wisdom decreed otherwise, when it gave unto
man a friend and companion in the first moments of his existence; but
is the world less desolate, less empty to a million hearts, because a
million others inhabit it as well? Has God's original intention
concerning the mutual love and companionship of His creatures,
survived unto the present day? I think the record of each reader's
large or small experience will answer this question for him eagerly
enough.
That these preliminary reflections should be the outgrowth of such an
ordinary event as the coming of a new baby into the already crowded
world may seem extravagant in more ways than one: but my object, as
the reader will see, is only to remind the forgetful majority, that
there are necessarily many reasons why men and women who have had a
common starting-point in life, should find themselves ere long at such
different goals.
I would suggest to them to consider the essential impressionability of
the human heart, especially in its period of early development, to
examine the nature of every external influence that weighs upon it,
and if the innocence of childhood has been recklessly forfeited with
time, to reserve their judgment until every aspect of the
circumstances has been impartially viewed.
I do not deny that the cradle in which I passed the first hours of
comfort and ease I have ever known, was rocked by a hand as loving as
that which rested caressingly upon the royal brow of the baby
Victoria. From the very first I was a peculiarly situated child,
surrounded by many comforts of which the majority of well-born
children are deprived, and deprived of many comforts by which
lowly-born children are surrounded. I was happiest when I was too
young to distinguish between pleasure and pain, and, as it were to
provide for the emptiness of much of my after life, destiny willed
that my memory should be the strongest and most comforting faculty of
my soul.
My mother died when I was but a few days old, and thus it is that I
have never known the real love or care of a true parent. Before I had
celebrated my third birthday there was another Mrs. Hampden presiding
over our household, but she was not my mother. This I never learned as
a direct fact, in simple words, until I had grown older; but there is
another channel through which truths of this sorrowful nature
oftentimes find their way: strange suspicions were creeping by degrees
into my heart, which with time gained great headway, and resolved
themselves into a questioning doubt, whether there had not been a day
when another, and a kinder face bent over my little cot, and smiled
upon me with a sweetness that did not chill and estrange me from it.
I had never been told in simple words, that my own mother lay under
one of those tall silent tombstones in the graveyard, where old
Hannah, our tried and trustworthy servant, was wont to go at times and
pray. No one had whispered to me that my father's second wife was, by
right, a stranger to the most sacred affections of my young soul, but
I learned the truth by myself.
When my growing heart began to seek and ask for the tender, patient
solicitude, which is to the child what the light and heat of the
summer sun are to the frailest tendril, no answer came to my mute
appeal. My little weaknesses and childish errors were never met with
that enduring forbearance which is the distinctive outgrowth of a
loving maternity. My trifling joys were rarely smiled upon, my petty
sorrows never shared nor soothed by that unsympathetic guardian of my
youth, and so I grew up by myself in a strange sort of isolation,
alienated in heart and spirit from those with whom of necessity I came
in daily contact.
And yet in many ways, my fathers' wife bestowed both care and
consideration upon me. My physical necessities were ever becomingly
attended to. I was allowed to sit at the table with her, which
privilege suggested no lack of substantial and dainty provisions, and
my governess was an accomplished and very discreet lady, whom my
step-mother secured after much trouble and worry; but here the limit
was drawn to her self-imposed duties; having done this much she rested
satisfied that she had so far outstepped the obligations of her
neutral position.
When I look back upon this period from the observatory of to-day, I
can afford to be more impartial in my judgments than I was in my youth
and immaturity. I know now, that my father's second wife was naturally
one of those selfish, narrow-hearted women, who never go outside of
their personal lot to taste or give pleasure. She had not the faintest
conception of what the cravings or desires of a truly sensitive nature
may be, and therefore knew nothing of the possible consequences of the
cold and unfeeling neglect with which my young life was blighted.
And even, had anyone told her, that her every word and action were
calculated to make a deep-rooted impression upon me, she would have
shrugged her shoulders pettishly, I doubt not, and declared that it
was "not her fault," that "some people were enough to provoke a
saint."
This was the woman whom the learned Doctor Hampden brought home to
conduct his household. He had found her under the gas-light at a
fashionable gathering, and was taken with her, he hardly knew why. She
was not very handsome, nor very winning, and certainly, not very
clever, but her family was a rare and tender off-shoot from an
unquestionably ancient and time-honored aristocracy, and, in
consequence, she carried her head high enough above the ordinary
social level, to have attracted a still more potent attention than Dr.
Hampden's.
I have heard that many a brow was arched in questioning surprise, when
the engagement was formally announced, and that nothing but the
ripening years of the prospective bride could have reconciled her more
sympathetic friends who belonged to that class of curious meddlers
that infest every society from pole to pole.
My father was undoubtedly a gentleman, and this was most
condescendingly admitted by his wife's fastidious coterie. A gentleman
by birth, by instinct, in dress, manners, taste, profession, and
general bearing. Moreover, he was a gentleman of social and political
influence, whose name had crept into journals and newspapers of
popular fame: in other words, he was one of "the men" of his day, with
a voice upon all public matters that agitated his immediate sphere.
Wherever he went, he was a gentleman of consequence, and carried no
mean individuality with him: he was that sort of a man one expects to
find married and settled in life, though here conjecture about him
must begin and end.
There are not a few men of his stamp in the world, and the reader I
doubt not has met them as frequently as I have myself. Sometimes they
are pillars of the state, leaders of political parties, with their
heads full of abstract calculations and wonderful statistics. Again
they are scientists, of a more or less exalted standing, artists,
antiquarians, agnostics, and undertakers, and they are all harmless,
respectable Benedicts, you know it without being told. You conclude it
from instinctively suggested premises, and yet in resting at such an
important conclusion nothing could have persuaded you to halt at the
every day, half-way house of courtship.
These men impress their fellow-men with the strange belief that
matrimony was for them a pre-ordained, forechosen vocation, a thing to
be done systematically according to reasons and rules, and the trivial
mind that would fain dwell upon a time in such methodical lives, when
heart predominated over head must apologize to the world of sentiment
and pass on to some less sensitive point of consideration.
My father, as I have said, was quite a consequential individual, his
very white, and very stiff, and very shining shirt-front insinuated as
much; his satiny black broadcloth confirmed it, and even the little
silk guard, that rested consciously upon his immaculate linen,
sustained the presumption. But for those and a few other reasons, he
was looked upon as a man of rigid method and severe discipline, a man
outside the grasp of ordinary human susceptibility, or, in more
familiar terms, a man "without a heart."
I remember, on one particular occasion, when the oft-ruffled serenity
of my step-mother's temperament was wonderfully agitated, that she
reproached him most touchingly for the utter absence of this tender,
palpitating organ; and turning towards her with a smile of the
blandest amusement, he explained to her, in a tone of remonstrative
sarcasm, laying two rigid fingers of one hand argumentatively in the
open palm of the other, "that no man could live without a heart," that
it was an essential element of existence, that its professional name
was derived from the Latin _cor_ or _cordis_, that it was "the great
central organ of circulation, with its base directed backward towards
the spine, and its point, forward and downward, towards the left side,
and that at each contraction it would be felt striking between the
fifth and sixth ribs about four inches from the medium line." "So you
see, my dear," he concluded calmly and coldly, "that you talk
nonsense, when you say I have no heart." That was my father's
disposition; to suspect that any one, or anything else could hope for
the privilege of making his heart beat, except this natural physical
contraction, were a vain and empty surmise indeed. And yet he had been
twice married; the question may suggest itself, had he ever loved? I
dare say he had analysed his amative propensity thoroughly, and knew
to what extent it existed within him, but when a man can reconcile
himself to the belief that on the "middle line of the skull, at the
back part of his head, there is a long projection, below which, and
between two similar protuberances, is his Organ of amativeness," or
that by which he learns "the lesson of life, the sad, sad lesson of
loving," methinks he is not outraged by a public opinion which casts
him down in disgust from the pedestal of respectable humanity, and
this option I will leave to the reader, even though the subject in
this instance be my own parent.
Whether his second wife, and the only Mrs. Hampden with whom we shall
have to deal, was disappointed in her expectations of her husband, or
not, is a something which I could only suspect, or at most, arrive at
from the indications of appearances, as I am entirely ignorant of what
the nature of such expectations may have been.
The domestic atmosphere of our home was apparently healthy, and
untroubled by foreign or unpleasant elements; our surroundings were
apparently comfortable, and the family apparently satisfied. What more
could be desired? Critics complain of the indiscreet writer, who
raises the thick impenetrable veil, which is supposed to screen a
domestic, political or social grievance from the common eye of all
three conditions. Even he who makes a little rend, with his own pen,
for his own ambition's sake, is not pardoned, and so if every picture
which the world holds up to view, presents a fair and brilliant
surface, whose business may it be to ask in an insinuating tone,
whether the other side is just as enchanting or not?
If the world insists upon calling an apparently happy home, happy in
reality, then ours was indisputably so, but the world and I have long
since ceased to agree upon matters of such a nature.
My father was married for some time to his second wife before any
material change came into their lives. I took advantage of the
interval and grew considerably, having proved a most opportune victim
on many an occasion for my disappointed step-mother's ill-humour. This
latter personage had contracted several real or imaginary disorders
and absorbed her own soul, with all its most tender attributes, in her
constant demand and need for a sympathy and solicitude which were
nowhere to be found. Her husband had retired by degrees into the
exclusive refuge of his scientific and literary pursuits, and lived as
effectually apart from the woman he had married, as far as friendly
intercourse and mutual confidence were concerned, as though they were
strangers.
And yet, whenever Mrs. Hampden found herself well enough to go out, my
father accompanied her with the most amiable urbanity; thus, from time
to time, they appeared among the gay coterie to which they always
belonged in name, looking as happy and contented as most husbands and
wives do, who, for half a dozen years or so, have been trying one
another's patience with more or less success.
Thus by a strange unfitness of things, will one unheeded uncared-for
little life drift out by itself into an open sea of dangers and
difficulties, with nothing more wholesome to distract it during the
long lonely hours of many successive days, as they come and go, than
its own morbid tendencies.
Necessarily, this abnormal growth of an impressionable young soul,
began to speak for itself, in accents which would have caught the
ready, willing ear of an attentive parent, had mine been such. In my
twelfth year I was as much a woman as I am to-day, matured and
hardened by an experience that would have blighted a more yielding and
less obdurate spirit.
Convinced, that in point of fact, I was alone in the world, dependent
upon my own resources for whatever little truant ray of sunshine I
might get from the golden flood that illuminated the world outside me,
and forced by rigid, arbitrary circumstances to train my growing
convictions into many a hazardous channel, left to myself to grope
among the dawning mysteries of life, that are a burden to age and
experience even when lightened by the helping hand of a common
sympathy, I ceased before long to struggle against these abstract foes
that made a mockery of my childish strength and resistance.
For the first few years of my life, therefore, I had been my own care,
my own and only friend, and oftentimes my own--but not only--enemy.
Occasionally my father chatted with me, but that was mostly when I was
in good humour, and would not let him get an insight into the secret
workings of my busy little heart. But, even supposing I had, with a
child's instinctive confidence in its parent, gone to him in my lonely
hours, and thrown my hands convulsively about his neck, to tell my
tale of trifling woes, what difference would it have made? Very
little. He would have given me a silver coin or two, and told me to
run away and amuse myself, that he was busy and could not spare his
time for idle amusement. No one knew this better than I did; the
memory of one such experiment tried in my very early youth will never
leave my mind: it seemed to me that no future, however laden with
compensating joys, could efface the dreary outlines which this
childish experience had stamped upon my heart.
That day, when full of a pent-up sorrow I had boldly decided to seek
comfort on my father's knee, is, and ever will be, a living, breathing
present to me. In stifled sobs, I tried to tell my little tale of
grief, and was about to bury my tear-stained face upon his shoulder,
when he raised his eyes impatiently, and brushed away, with a peevish
gesture, one of my salt tears that lay appealingly upon the smooth
broadcloth covering of his arm: he chided me for crying so very
immoderately, saying, he hated "little girls that cried," and drawing
a silver piece from his pocket, he slipped it into my little trembling
hand, and banished me from the room.
I never forgot this, from my dignified, gentlemanly father, although
in my outward conduct there was nothing which insinuated the slightest
reproach for the pain he had given me on that occasion.
When I left his cheerless presence, I remember going back to my
play-room and throwing myself wearily into my little rocking-chair,
where, with my face turned to the wall, I cried as if my baby-heart
would break.
Here I rehearsed each feature of my bitter disappointment, and as my
young spirit rose in proud and angry revolt against a fate that could
wound me so undeservedly, I flung the wretched coin, with which my
thoughtless parent sought to buy his ease and comfort from me,
violently upon the floor.
Through my blinding tears I watched it roll quietly over the carpet
and stop suddenly against the prostrate figure of a doll that lay at a
little distance from where I sat. This incident changed the whole
tenor of my rebellious thought; in the earlier part of the day I had
dressed this doll in very fine clothes, intending to carry it to the
house of a poor neighbor, who lived in the rear of my father's
premises, and whose baby-girl was confined, through some hopeless
deformity, to the narrow limits of an invalid chair.
Something prevented me from carrying out this generous design at the
time, but the discarded coin unexpectedly revived my abandoned
project, and turned my thoughts into a pleasant channel. I rose up and
dried my eyes, and putting on my little sun-bonnet, gathered up the
fashionable wax lady and the piece of despised money, and stealing
down a quiet back-stairway, I went out on my mission of charity.
When I reached the home of my little invalid friend, I peered
noiselessly in at the window, as was my custom, lest, perhaps, I
should awaken her from one of her quiet slumbers, but this time she
was not sleeping; she sat upright in her chair with pillows at her
back, and her thin hair fell from her bowed head over the worn and
dog-eared pages of her mother's prayer-book. It was her only other
companion, besides her mother and me, and through many long, lonely
hours she was wont to turn the leaves backward and forward, dwelling
with the instinctive reverence of unsullied childhood, upon the homely
and inartistic representations it contained of the beautiful Drama of
the Redemption.
Such things, though seemingly trifling to relate, at this remote
period, when the sinful and foolish vanities of the world have crowded
themselves in between me and my cherished memories of that holy epoch,
I now regard as the true and unmistakeable key-note of my after life.
For, was it not to little Ella Wray I first assumed the attitude of
the worldling: subscribing to the laws and exigencies of
conventionality before I had suspected the existence of such an
influence? When she praised me, and thanked me, and urged me to be
grateful to the kind Father who had willed my surroundings to be those
of comfort and prosperity, what did I do? Good reader! I smiled half
consciously, and thus sanctioned her belief in my domestic happiness.
I veiled the sorrow that dwelt in my young heart with the shadows of a
borrowed playfulness, and I sullied the baby innocence of my
unsuspecting soul with a smiling lie.
But even in its infancy, human nature is prone to every passing
weakness that assails it. To know that other eyes looked out from a
narrower sphere upon my individual portion, and found it rich in
advantages over many others: to feel that in spite of all my harassing
little cares, my life could assume an exterior aspect of smoothness
and happiness, was a short-lived, though powerful stimulant, even to
my childish heart; and I could not forfeit the small pleasure I took
in the consciousness, that at least my sufferings were hidden, though
my pleasures were widely known, by laying bare the actual condition of
my affairs.
Naturally enough, this feeling has but strengthened and matured with
time and experience, and to-day, scattered broadcast over the world,
are friends of my childhood, my girlhood, and my womanhood, who look
upon my life as a tolerably beautiful thing, set apart by a lenient
destiny for a perpetual sunshine to brighten.
Ah well! Who knows, in this strange world whether there are many
happier than I? May it not be that other faces wear the mask of smiles
with which I myself have played a double part? I think I know enough
of human nature now, to suspect with Reason, that this livery of
contentment and joy which dazzles our eyes at intervals, as we review
the multitudes of the laughing and the gay, is a thing to be put on
and off at will, like any other garment; and hence is it that the
earthly happiness of men and women is susceptible of a relative
definition only. I do not wish to argue that such a thing as happiness
itself has become as obsolete in our day as hoop-skirts and
side-combs, for, from the earliest reflections I have ever indulged
in, I have concluded that it is quite easy to attain to a tolerable
degree of happiness, if external influences be not too desperately at
variance with our efforts to arrive at its tempting goal: and even
now, when I have made my way through some of the densest and darkest
fogs of experience, I know I should be happy yet, if, some day, I may
see the masses in revolt against the unjust tenets of nineteenth
century _convenances_, and advocating in its stead the beautiful
doctrine of "soul to soul as hand to hand."
Possibly, all these regretful conclusions are a sequel to the early
disappointments and sorrows of my younger days, for, I admit, that
though I thrived after a fashion under their depressing influence,
they had, most necessarily, a peculiar effect upon my temperament.
The one thing that wearied me above and more than all others, was the
changeless monotony of my existence; every day a tiresome repetition
of another, which forced me to attribute little or no value to time.
I was not old enough to be sent to school, although I had entered upon
what is called the years of discretion, but my father's wife had a
high-bred fear, lest in sending me to an educational establishment I
should indulge my uncouth tendencies by cultivating unfashionable
acquaintances, that in after years, might possibly, in some remote,
indefinite way, reflect upon her own unimpeachable dignity.
There came a day, however, when exacting circumstances obliged her to
look upon the prospect of placing me at school with a more impartial
eye. A change was creeping, slowly, but surely, into our lives: hardly
for the better in one way, and yet, in the end, I must acknowledge,
that to it I owe much of the happiness I have ever known.
Whether or not my obdurate step-mother was in reality as susceptible
as a woman should be, I am not free to say; but when, after a few
years of wedded life, the prospect of maternity began to grow less
shadowy and more reliable, her heart did seem to swell at rare
intervals with a real, or assumed pity for the little woman who had
been left to wander about motherless and friendless, spending her
young life, unheeded, among the cheerless apartments of her own
father's house.
While this new phase of existence was unfolding itself before her
eyes, like the lava from a long-slumbering volcano, a kind word or
deed was born now and then of the momentary influence. She would
stroke my head with a gesture of repenting, amending tenderness, give
me a bunch of gay ribbons for my last new doll, or even read me a
thrilling tale from my Christmas book of nursery fictions; but that
impulse was necessarily short-lived, and once it became spent, the
crater of her heart closed up again, and all was as cold and quiet as
before.
To my untutored mind, this relaxation, limited though it was, became a
perplexing mystery. I was conscious of no improvement in my attitude
towards my step-mother, I had not even wished, or determined to show
her any more marked affection or respect than I had ever done, and
this, to tell the truth, was precious little.
I did not know then, that this generous impulse of hers was
independent of her own desire or will, that it filled her heart
without her sanction or command, just as her life-blood did; that it
permeated her very being, when she neither sought nor expected it, and
that as it was self-creative, so would it of itself find a
satisfactory outlet in expressions and actions of tender womanly
solicitude.
As soon as my half-brother made his entrance into the world, however,
things took another turn. I was no longer the free, unfettered
creature I had been for the first part of my life. I could no longer
dispose of my days and hours as I liked best, but was on the contrary
forced to devote many of them to occupations of a most distasteful
nature.
The coming of this insignificant stranger into our home seemed a
disturbing and restless evil in my eyes. Naturally my stepmother was
beside herself with ecstacy, but why should she have expected the rest
of the household to be as absurdly enthusiastic?
When baby slept, the silence and stillness of death were sacredly and
solemnly imposed upon all. When baby was awake, the clatter provoked
for its infantship's pleasure was noisome and deafening to all.
With the advent of this undesirable relative into our home is
associated, for me, the remembrance of all such impatient entreaties
as, "Amey, bring your toys here to baby--Amey, come and sing to
baby--Amey, come and rock baby to sleep"--and I, though striving to
encourage a good intention and a hopeful outlook, finally succumbed to
the very human perversity of my soul, and when every atom of ordinary
endurance had given out, I realized that I had ended by loathing the
very name, or sight, or idea of the unwelcome baby.
Then, came a fresh burden of domestic worries to my unfortunate
step-mother. She could not trust her darling to the care of servants;
each one that she tried seemed determined to kill the little idol;
they handled it as roughly and carelessly as if it were an ordinary
baby; shook it when it screamed and refused to rock it while it slept.
In the end, with the undaunted heroism of unselfish maternity, she
resigned herself wholly and entirely to the exclusive care of her
beloved offspring, ministering to its ever increasing and multiplying
wants, with an admirable forebearance and kindness. Poor woman! she
found more than ample field for her patience and perseverance.
Blest with the healthiest of lungs, my new step-brother had no
scruples about asserting himself loudly and peevishly at all hours of
the day and night; rending the air with prolonged and impatient
screams that wounded the sensitive mother's heart deeply, and
irritated the rest of the household beyond endurance.
By degrees its much tried parent was made to realize that this noisy
acquisition to her home was considered unquestionably and
irreclaimably, her own. No one envied it to her, and as no one sought
to share any of the possible benefits that might follow in its wake,
neither did they seek to bear any of the burden of its existence in
the smallest detail.
The overjoyed, yet afflicted mother, was welcome to whatever comfort
or happiness her prophetic soul foresaw as a recompense to all this
endless worry and trouble. Even my father grew unsympathetic, and
actually arose one night when baby's plaintive minor key was
resounding through the house, and closed his bed-room door most
emphatically, to keep out the disturbing echoes that had broken in
upon his comfortable repose.
None of this passed unnoticed by my fretted stepmother, whose open
soul absorbed every passing instance of this nature, and stowed away
its keen impressions to be acted upon later, when time had modified
her responsibilities, and granted her a little respite from the
troubles of to-day.
In the agitated meanwhile I had begun to try my young wings. I felt
myself growing inwardly and outwardly; something was stirring my heart
with unusual palpitations. I was beginning to realize that life after
all did not mean what daily passed within the narrow arena of my home;
something whispered to me that outside those paltry limits, far away
over all the spires and chimney-tops, where the sky was so bright and
blue, life, real life, unfolded itself under many a varied aspect, and
with this suspicion, sprung up a lingering dissatisfaction, a longing
for something which no words of mine could define.
How clearly does this epoch of my life stand forth from the dreary
background of experience as I look at it from the watch-tower of
to-day? How I know now that this was the farewell passage of my
childhood, which was winging its flight, and leaving me to struggle
with the naked realities of life, which had hitherto been hidden and
undreamt of mysteries to me.
Ah! that passage of childhood, what a void it makes in the growing
heart; and how quietly its place is filled by unworthier influences.
Does all the abstract wealth, which there might be in the growth and
development of those who learn the alphabet of life upon our knee,
take one pang from the natural and pardonable sorrow with which we
watch the heavy footprint of an inevitable experience, crushing out
the last frail remnant of childhood from the hearts of those who such
a little while before were our "little ones?"
There is something far more appealing to the parent's heart in the
half worn stocking of the child who toddled from its cradle to its
grave, than in the mighty quill of her grey-haired poet son, rusted
though it be in the service of his art. In the broken stem of an
unfinished life, a mother mourns a host of possibilities that can
never now be realized; if we may credit the prophecies of such
sorrowing mothers who, bending over the cradle from which some
baby-spirit has just passed into the kingdom of the little ones, tell
in broken accents of sorrow and regret of all the promises of goodness
and greatness which have been sacrificed with that life, we must truly
admit that the world in all its wealth of heroes, bold and brave, its
bards, its poets, its grand masters of the quill, the chisel and the
brush, has not on record such another career as has been blighted in
its bloom each time the stern death-angel stood beside an infant's
cot.
And, if there are evils in our day which no human power can baffle or
subdue, with which reason and morals are struggling in vain, we must
not forget, as we dwell upon them, what the possible, nay even
probable mission was, of each little pair of dimpled hands that he
crossed on each still unheaving bosom, wherein might have been buried
secrets and mysteries which the world will now never know.
Yet, methinks, this transit from the cradle to the coffin is not so
sad in all its bearings as that other death of childhood, which
introduces us, not into a safe and definite eternity, but only into
another phase of temporal life; when the toys and the picture books
are stowed away, when the mind and heart are awakening in their
beautiful, untarnished susceptibility to the impressions of a world of
perils and of sorrows.
Not unlike our final passage is it either, for we go through it once,
and once only, and from its threshold our footsteps are directed
towards good or evil, for after-life. Let us remember this always,
when we are tempted to pass our rigid judgments upon our
fellow-creatures. Let us not lose sight of these occult impediments of
fate, that may have caused our fallen brother to halt and stagger in
the way of righteousness almost in spite of his watchfulness and eager
intentions to do what is good.
Without wearying the reader with a detailed account of that period of
my life immediately associated with the advent of my interesting
half-brother, I can permit myself to mention a few things which were
only a very natural outgrowth of this altered condition of our
domestic affairs.
First and foremost be it understood that I looked upon this new-comer
as a contribution sent by nature to fill up the gap that existed
between my step-mother's affections and mine, and naturally enough,
according as this child grew he drifted our two lives farther and
farther asunder. He absorbed all the latent sympathy and love from the
maternal heart, and as such ardent sentiments had long been aliens
from my breast, he had nothing to draw from the second source but a
placid and harmless indifference.
My father held a reception occasionally in his sanctum, whither baby
was carried with great pomp and ceremony to be smiled upon approvingly
until his good humour gave way, as soon as the little features
wrinkled ominously my father waved his hand towards the door,
escorting mother, and child, and nurse with the most eager courtesy
out of the room.
I need not tell my readers that the machinery of our domestic life was
sadly awry; neither in separate parts, nor as a whole, did it work
properly or satisfactorily, the metal was harsh and the little wheels
could never be got to run briskly or smoothly. How could they? I think
of all the hopeless conditions on earth, that which aspires to be able
to blend human lives together, which have no more leaning towards one
another than virtue to vice, is the maddest and vainest of all.
An absence of common sympathies between two human hearts, will drift
them apart in spite of the hugest efforts that can be made to attract
them to a point of mutual interest; they who hope either by subterfuge
or unselfish zeal, to reconcile phases of human character that have
not originally sprung from a common root of harmonious unison or
contrast, are as sure to see their ambition as ingloriously defeated
as if they had revived the search for the philosopher's stone.
And yet how much estrangement there is among men and women who, if
they had never been bound together by the sacred and solemn pledges of
wedded love, are supposed still to live according to a precept of
universal charity? How indifferent they become to one another's
fortune or fate? How repulsive to them the very suggestion of entering
generously into one another's lives to share each other's pleasures
and pains?
The world is full of this occult antagonism; every day Christians, as
I have known them, look upon the happiness or sorrow of their brother
toilers as so much subtracted from their own glad or miserable
experience. Hence do they begrudge the smiles of fortune that cheer
another life outside their own, and are so easily satisfied to see
furrows on other brows than their own. I know that the human heart is
instinctively covetous of earthly happiness, and, in nine cases out of
ten argues that its end justifies the means, whatever they may be, of
insuring it. But I also know, that those fitful flashes of sunlight
that cross the path of struggling mortals in the course of an ordinary
human life, are too visionary and short-lived to begin to repay us for
the unworthy barter of our better selves, which is the price of such
transient joys.
What is real happiness but a memory or an anticipation? Do we realize
that it presides over our daily lives? Not until it has become a thing
of the past; and as for the happiness of anticipation, it is not worth
much when we take into account the vague uncertainty of the issues of
time, and the instability of unborn to-morrows.
In a word then, our pleasure is nothing but a negative sensation while
it lasts; we are conscious that, for the time being, the burdensome
fetters of sorrow are loosened, and our souls expand in a glorious
freedom, the power of fate is temporarily suspended, the pressure is
removed from our spirit which soars about in its native element, like
a captive bird set free, flapping its poor paralysed wings that from
long imprisonment have almost forgotten their use--but pain!
Ah! surely no one questions whether pain is a positive sensation or
not; no one at least whose head has been bowed by adversity until his
lips have touched the bitter waters, and tasted perhaps largely of
their unpleasantness! Pain is vastly more to the human heart than the
absence of pleasure; pain is not merely an emptiness, or void, created
by the flight of more cheerful influences; it has a more definite and
distinct acceptation than this would allow; it has as many dark and
melancholy meanings as there are suffering souls in existence; it has
its phases of youth and maturity, now hopeful, now despairing, either
our enemy or our friend.
It professes to dwell among the children of men with the very
strictest impartiality, for pain is an aristocrat and a pauper; pain
rides in fine carriages, and clothes itself in fine linen; it smiles
and sings as often as it mourns and weeps; pain is learned, and it is
ignorant; it underlies the deepest, tenderest love, and it instigates
the darkest, bitterest hatred; in a word it is a weed which infests
the very choicest parterres of our minds and hearts, it thrives among
the buds and blossoms of men's intellects, and abounds above all among
the flowers and fruits of his affections; it is indigenous to both
soils, and no toiler, however industrious or persevering, has ever yet
succeeded in subduing its ravages.
It is no wonder then that we sometimes go on a wild-goose chase after
pleasure; it is not surprising that the wisest of us make foolish
attempts to grasp the will-o'-the-wisp that has been coaxing and
deceiving men for centuries. It is surprising that our persistent
self-confidence persuades our better sense that where countless
generations of pleasure-seekers have failed we can hope to succeed.
This parenthetical deviation is the fruit of my deep reflections
concerning this early period of my development; it is the web which
the deft fingers of my memory have woven around many a quiet reverie;
the substance of many a fire side cogitation, the phantoms of many a
twilight's dreaming.
I doubt not, that in that world of speculative opinions and
questionings, I have met the kindred spirits of many of my fellow
beings, clad in the ideal personality with which my thought invests
people, at the cross of those four great roads towards which, from all
corners of the earth, the spirits of mankind come trooping. We have
only to close our lids upon our external surroundings and swift as
thought itself is our passage into that fairy land of our reverie.
As early as my tenth year I had begun to build castles in the open
fire and to people the gloaming with whispering shadows; somehow the
habit has grown with me through all these years, with this difference,
however: in the reveries of my womanhood the heroes and heroines come
to me, from a long vanished past, clothed in a misty reality, and
associated with every joy and sorrow of my life.
In my childhood these were typical visions, the anticipation of a
restless impatience which yearned for the touchstone of sober
experience, to-day they are the re-creation of memory, and a rehearsal
of all those circumstances that have made sober experience a
comprehensive word for me.
Not that my life has made a heroine of me either in the world's eyes
or my own. I dare say, to the passive observer, it is plain and
ordinary enough. It is when we take away the flesh and blood reality,
which is the temple of the moral man, that the common-place aspects of
life become strange and attractive.
Subtract one of those every-day lives from the busy, moving mass of
humankind and place it under the microscope; bring up to the visible
surface all that has lain hidden for years from the casual glance of
the general observer; lay bare the secret tenor of its every thought
and motive and impulse. Is it any longer the thing it seemed to be
when jostled about in the busy throng?
Pluck one of the dusty blades of grass that grow unheeded by the
roadside; there are hundreds of them at your feet so much alike that
the one you chose had no identity, whatever, until you had, by chance
or design, separated it from the rest. Bear it away to your home and
place it under a powerful lens; is it still the same uninteresting
blade it was a moment ago out in the noisy and crowded thoroughfare?
Why does your gaze become riveted upon what is revealed? Ah! you
discern that such homely things are not at all what you have been wont
to think them. You are astonished to find how each individual trifle
is in itself a wonderful creation, swarming with a hidden and undreamt
of life, feeding a multitude of appetites, satisfying countless
cravings, struggling with a most powerful vitality, and challenging
powers, whose unseen tyranny is unsuspected by more than half the
world.
No wonder, then, that a singled-out human life excites our
astonishment; no wonder that we look upon an isolated fellow-creature
as if he were not one of us, but removed by adventitious circumstances
far above or below the common level of men and women.
It is not always the exaggerating pen of the author that creates
heroes and heroines out of our prosy humanity, and it is an undeniable
and stable fact that truth is far stranger than fiction. It is because
we men and women will conceal the realities of our lives from one
another, and under the banner of an all-enduring pride, struggle for
the privilege of living under a surface of smooth, unruffled evenness,
that humanity has become susceptible of so many false and misleading
interpretations.